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2022-12-24 15:14:43 Great Space pinned a photo Open / Comment

2022-12-23 11:01:03 2022: a space yearbook
There was a lot going on in the space industry this year — here are some of the highlights.

It was a good year for space. NASA finally got its long-anticipated Moon rocket off the ground, SpaceX beat its annual record for space launches in July, and JWST continued to bring us picture after picture of the wonders of the cosmos.

That’s not to say everything ran smoothly — there were definitely some big bumps in the road — but space research, observation, and industry all had huge years nonetheless. And even in a year as full of progress and innovation as this one, some projects really set themselves apart.

Here are some of the biggest, best, and weirdest moments of the year in space. Open / Comment

2022-12-21 15:01:49 A million Starlink subscribers.
SpaceX has announced that its satellite internet service now has a million active subscribers.

That’s a lot of people getting their internet from space.It makes sense that the company hit the milestone this year — in the past 12 months it’s expanded its Starlink offerings, adding options for people with businesses, boats, planes, and RVs. All the extra subscribers do come at a cost though; the company recently announced that it’s adding data caps.

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2022-12-21 15:00:09 NASA's InSight lander just recorded its biggest quake on Mars ever

The mega-marsquake, which is 5 times stronger than the previous record, may be the last big find from the InSight Mars Lander.

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2022-12-16 23:12:57 How NASA’s newest satellite will monitor lakes and rivers from space

The SWOT satellite will keep track of water systems around the globe.
Early tomorrow morning, a new Earth monitoring instrument called the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, or SWOT, will launch into space on a SpaceX rocket. The satellite will take the first global survey of Earth’s freshwater systems from space, observing not only the oceans but also lakes, rivers, and coastal regions. It will be able to measure the height of water in these systems for the first time.

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2022-12-15 23:06:49 How researchers recorded the sounds of a Martian dust devil for the first time
The Perseverance rover listened in as a dust devil whirled by its location on Mars.

On September 27th, 2021, a dust devil whirled past the Perseverance rover on Mars. The rover not only caught the dust devil on its cameras and with its weather sensors but also picked up the faint, eerie sounds of the dust devil on its microphone, the first instrument of its kind to record sounds on Mars.

“We were convinced that the microphone was going to give us a whole load of new observations of atmospheric features on Mars that we hadn’t been able to see before,” Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of a Nature Communications paper about the research, said to The Verge. “And we haven’t been disappointed!”

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2022-12-12 22:03:53 NASA successfully completes its Artemis I mission.

The Orion spacecraft safely splashed down into the Pacific Ocean after a historic mission around the Moon. NASA’s Orion spacecraft has returned to Earth. The uncrewed capsule safely splashed down into the Pacific Ocean off of Mexico’s Baja California around 12:40PM ET on Sunday, marking the end of the landmark Artemis I mission.

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2022-12-06 23:56:53 Moonikin Campos rests inside Orion capsule during lunar round-trip

NASA's dummy Moonikin Campos is resting inside the Orion spaceship during the Artemis 1 lunar roundtrip in a new image released by NASA.

The doll, strapped into the commander seat of the Orion crew capsule, is wearing a real space suit designed for future moon-bound astronauts. Named after NASA electrical engineer Arturo Campos who played a key role in rescuing the troubled Artemis 13 mission in 1970, the mannequin is fitted with dozens of sensors designed to assess the effects of the deep space environment on the human body. Unlike astronauts working on the International Space Station, who are protected by Earth's magnetic field, space travelers on lunar round trips will be subject to much higher levels of cosmic radiation, which can be harmful to their health.

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2022-12-04 23:37:57 China's Shenzhou 14 astronauts return to Earth after helping build Tiangong space station

China's Shenzhou 14 astronauts have handed over control of the Tiangong space station and returned to Earth.

The return capsule from the mission's Shenzhou spacecraft set down safely after sunset within the Dongfeng landing area in the Gobi Desert in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Sunday (Dec. 4) at around 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT, 8:00 p.m. local time), about nine hours after undocking from the country's recently completed Tiangong space station.

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2022-12-03 16:00:03 A black hole ripped apart a star and brought together astronomers from around the world.
Astronomers spotted a ‘weird’ flash in February, equivalent to the light of more than 1,000 trillion suns.

It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.

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